Tksurfer display problems and solutions
The surface display app 'tksurfer' is an X11-app making use of OpenGL for graphics rendering. The complexity of this sort app is described in detail here.
The most common problem encountered in using tksurfer for the first time on a system is the 'sliver' problem, where just a 'sliver' of the surface is displayed, as shown in the bottom-left of this picture:
There are a few potential solutions you can try to overcome this problem:
NVidia driver update
If your system has an Nvidia graphics driver, then updating this to the latest version often times fixes the problem. To do this:
su root /sbin/init 3 /usr/bin/nvidia-installer --update
Follow the instructions of the installer